The sys admin's daily grind: TTYtter
Twittering Machine
Twitter, so everyone says, is modern, fun, sociologically illuminating and otherwise useless. Even Charly feeds a budgie – but at the console, it's a question of style.
I like graphical clients – in fact, I would be lost without Thunderbird – but because I often spend hours in front of machines without X11, I keep on top of the good old command-line tools. For example, I love using the Mutt mail client, and both slrn for Usenet and Irssi for IRC run on a small root server in a screen session.
Recently, I added another animal to my console zoo: TTYtter [1]. As you might guess from the hybrid name, TTYtter is a non-graphical Twitter client. The Perl script uses either cURL [2] or Lynx [3] to connect to the Twitter API. TTYtter's author, Cameron Kaiser, who also happens to be a doctor, deliberately avoided special Perl modules like Net::Twitter so that he could run the tool on systems that are not allowed to download modules from CPAN.
I normally start my TTYtter with the following command:
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